Opinion
Letters

Letters to the editor, March 12

It was just announced that our prison farms will not be getting their cows back, as we were promised a week ago. They will be getting goats instead. This gives clarity as to what is going on behind the closed doors where such decisions are made. The milk marketing board got a big customer for its overpriced milk when the prison farms were closed, and it wants to keep it that way. The goat milk will be exported to China, preserving the prison milk market here. The Milk Marketing Board is a master at protecting its interests. It knows exactly which buttons to push. It has the lingo down pat and the consumers are carefully kept out of the discussion. Our politicians don't stand a chance.

We have heard a lot about Loblaws illegally fixing the price of bread. Milk, eggs and cheese are all overpriced by about 50 per cent relative to the fair cost of production in an open competitive market, but that right to price fix is defended by our governments. The justification for price fixing is simple, farmers get out of bed early, they work hard, and their product is good for us. Well the people working at the bakeries also start early and work hard. Kraft, Black Diamond and Supoto don't need legal market protection to survive; they do very well on the other side of the St. Lawrence River in an open market. The dairy farmers do well there, too, and it is not due to dairy subsidies. I checked the data.

It is time that Kingston and the Islands MP Mark Gerretsen and MPP Sophie Kilwala looked into the issues of the forces behind the marketing boards. They need to find out why dairy quota is now worth $35 billion when the only thing that makes it worth anything is the right to charge far above fair market price, relative to the cost of production. It is that simple! There is no other answer! Dairy quota was given to the farmers for free when the system was set up. This is a measure of how bad the system has turned against the consumers. Quota has nothing to do with quality assurance, and all other food commodities self-regulate quantity in an open market. Kraft, Black Diamond and Supoto don't need marketing boards, but they sure know how to defend their interests with it, and you pay for it.